Google is rolling out an update to Google Now that will allow you to dictate and send messages through a number of popular third-party messaging apps including WhatsApp, the company announced in a blog post.

Google Now will also send messages through Viber, WeChat, Telegram, and NextPlus

WeChat, Viber, Telegram, and NextPlus are the other initial third-party services that Google Now will be able to send messages through. Simply say “Ok Google, send a WhatsApp message to Tom,” and Google will render and send the message through the proper service.

The feature is currently only available in English, but Google says it will be adding more languages and more apps in the future. This is just the latest step in Google’s attempt to turn Google Now into your true personal assistant, and it’s a smart move. Google is consistently improving and adding features to Google Now, at a faster rate than Microsoft is with Cortana, and much faster than Apple has with Siri. At this rate, it won’t be a competition for much longer.

Fujitsu has teamed up with Google to deliver an enterprise-grade managed service offering in Australia and New Zealand that it says leverages the flexibility, simplicity and security of the Chrome platform (Chromebooks and Chromeboxes).

Under the partnership, the Fujitsu Managed Chromebook Service will equip organisations with a flexible, scalable and cost effective solution to employee mobility, comprehensively controlled by Fujitsu’s managed services.

The Managed Chromebook Service is closely aligned with Fujitsu’s Virtual Workplace Solution, which will allow Chromebook users to access their traditional applications and data via virtual desktop technology. Fujitsu partners with Citrix to deliver the service.

Phil Dean-Jones, Senior Director of Channel Sales and Partner Development, APAC, at Citrix, said, “As more and more Citrix customers move to cloud-based delivery of Windows Desktops and Applications, Fujitsu is a key Service Provider with a track record for hosting Citrix and managing these migrations across Australia and the world.

“Momentum for Chromebooks has been building and the cost benefits are clear, however the first question asked by customers is ‘what about my Windows applications?’ which is why Citrix released our Receiver for Chromebook in 2013.

“We see the new Fujitsu Managed Chromebook Service as the next step for these devices, as the Chromebook gains mainstream business attention, now backed in Australia by a Tier 1 Citrix Service Provider in Fujitsu.”

The Fujitsu Managed Chromebook Service enables customers to select the Chromebook of their choice. When combined with a Citrix virtual desktop or application environment, Dean-Jones says the service provides a versatile, highly secure and well managed client computing solution with seamless access to both Windows and Web based applications for the enterprise.

According to Kevin Ackhurst, Director, Google for Work Asia Pacific, said: “Businesses around the world have found that Chromebooks provide them with a more secure and simple way of working. They’re fast, easy to share and easy to manage, and we’re delighted to be working with Fujitsu to bring these benefits to more businesses across Australia and New Zealand.”

Mike Foster, Chief Executive Officer of Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand, said the company knew from discussions with its customers that there was a growing interest in the Chromebook as an enterprise platform.

“We are proud of our new partnership with Google and our ability to continue pushing innovation boundaries. We are the first SI to offer managed services to enterprises for Chromebooks as part of our vision of ‘Workplace Anywhere’.”

The company surveyed 2,000 smartphone owners between October and December 2014 to find out which apps they were using most. The poll excluded apps that ship with operating systems, so apps like Apple’s Mail, iMessage, Calendar, and Safari browser are not included.

Of the apps they chose to download, users spent 13% of their total time in Facebook’s apps, and the bulk of that time (11.5% of total time spent) is spent doing social networking — probably Facebook’s main app and Instagram. The rest is split evenly between communication — most likely with messaging apps like Messenger and WhatsApp — and news reading, presumably through the main app.

Data warehousing traditionally required a company to extract and download huge volumes of data from various business software systems into a central repository for analysis. The process to prep the data was slow which meant that the analysis was always run against data that was already partially stale.

But recently we’re seeing a new generation of data warehousing, one based on cloud computing. This week saw the announcement of general availability of Snowflake. Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehouse running on Amazon AWS. The company is led by Microsoft veteran Bob Muglia. Snowflake received $26 million in funding in October 2014 and has received another round of $45 million this past week.

What’s unique about Snowflake among the crowd of other recent data-focused startups is that it isn’t based on Hadoop and it was built from scratch with the cloud in mind. Features of Snowflake include:

Singaporean government-linked corporations are notable for their investments and dealings abroad, as well as their portfolio management methods, which are held up as models for state-owned enterprises. State-owned Temasek Holdings, for instance is often noted has been the subject of an NUS-CIMA study. Meanwhile, GIC has been the subject of much research often focused on sovereign wealth funds. Singtel has joined a network of partnerships led by Intel and Alibaba Group, while GIC is sourcing for more investment opportunities in West Bengal. In the energy sector, the Singapore-listed Ezra Group has secured contracts worth $115 million.

A misconfiguration at Telekom Malaysia late last week caused large-scale routing issues which cascaded through providers in Oceania and elsewhere in the world, resulting in customers experiencing severe network problems. The issue started at at 6:43pm AEST last Friday when Telekom Malaysia made changes to its routers using the border gateway protocol (BGP), which is used by providers and networks to decide how data traffic flows via prefixes inserted into the internet routing table.

NEW DELHI: Yahoo announced that it will host its mobile developer meet in New Delhi on June 24 and in Bengaluru on June 26. Jarah Euston, vice president of analytics and marketing at Flurry (owned by Yahoo), said: “India has a vibrant, rapidly growing app developer community. As a mobile-first company, we understand the need for app developers to have a strong mobile analytics and monetization engine.”

Microsoft’s Azure platform and Office 365 have achieved, Level 3, of the Multi-Tier Cloud Security (MTCS) Standard for Singapore (SS 584) which has been designed for regulated organizations with specific requirements and more stringent security requirements. Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM Online has also been assessed and certified as complying with Level 2 of MTCS SS, which is designed to address the needs of most organizations running business critical data and systems through a set of more stringent security controls to protect business and personal information in potentially moderate impact information systems using cloud services.

BENGALURU: Tata Consultancy Services and International Business Machines have emerged as frontrunners in the race to win Swedish truckmaker AB Volvo’s IT outsourcing contract, worth about $500 million, according to people familiar with the matter. As part of the deal, which is expected to stretch over three to five years, Volvo will outsource its IT business unit, they said, adding that HP and Infosys are among the other firms being evaluated. Volvo may give out business worth at least $100 million a year as part of this deal, they said, requesting anonymity.

It is almost lunchtime when I step into Suntech Tower, an unspectacular office building which is home to several high-flying Penang startups. As is typical here, the afternoon sun is scorching, so the cold air-conditioning that greets me as I enter is a welcome reprieve. Today, I am here to visit Piktochart, whose infographic design app is arguably one of the Malaysian state’s most accomplished startups to date. It boasts 2.7 million users, of which 300,000 are active monthly.

Telekomunikasi Indonesia International (Telin Singapore) has started construction of a 20,000 square metre, five-storey Data Centre and Telecommunication Hub located at Singapore’s Data Center Park (DCP) in Jurong. This new facility will be the third datacenter owned and managed by Telin Singapore. To be branded as Telin-3, it will address the growing demand for premium datacenter services to support Singapore’s Smart Nation vision. It will also address demand from the region and global markets where Telin Singapore is able to play a pivotal role in providing reliable, secured and seamless regional and global telecommunications connectivity services.

China has begun to implement its investment plans aiming to boost development of the local semiconductor industry, and will inject a total of CNY600 billion (US$19.4 billion) into the industry over the next five years, according to industry sources. Almost 70% of the investment fund will be poured into the IC manufacturing and equipment sectors, with a focus on promoting locally produced logic chips, DRAM and NAND flash memory, said the sources. A group of logic chipmakers led by Semiconductor Manufacturing International (SMIC) has benefited from the first phase of investment, the sources observed.

NTT Communications announced today that it has been positioned as a Leader in International Data Corporation’s (IDC) first ever “IDC ITMarketScape: Asia/Pacific Managed Security Services 2015 Vendor Assessment” report. The IDC ITMarketScape represents a vendor assessment including both quantitative and qualitative characteristics that define success in today’s managed security services market. IDC evaluated 16 organizations that offer managed security services (MSS) in Asia/Pacific by conducting in-depth interviews with MSS providers and more than 20 interviews with providers’ customers.

“In light of their strong smartphone sales in the emerging markets, the Indian and Chinese phone manufacturers increased their footprint during the first quarter of 2015. Six of them were in the top 10 in the first quarter of 2015,” Gartner Research director Anshul Gupta said.

“During this quarter, local brands and Chinese vendors came out as the key winners in emerging markets. These vendors recorded an average growth of 73 % in smartphone sales and saw their combined share go up from 38 % to 47 % during the first quarter of 2015,” Gupta said.

TELEKOMUNIKASI Indonesia International Pte Ltd (Telin Singapore), a subsidiary of PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia, said it was the first in Asia Pacific to be certified a Cisco Systems Inc authorised technology provider for WebEx. With that, Telin Singapore has unveiled new business offerings to help telecommunication service providers and enterprise clients add automation to their Cisco web conference services-based clouds, it said in a statement.

REDWOOD CITY – Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the global interconnection and data center company, today announced its plans to further expand its footprint inHong Kong. It will invest over $40 million to build the third phase of its second International Business Exchange ™ (IBX®) data center (HK2). It will also build the ninth phase of its first data center (HK1). The new facilities will meet strong demand from cloud and content and digital media (CDM) companies for data center and interconnection services inHong Kong.

With price competition escalating and squeezing profitability in the global tablet computer sector, many manufacturer have shifted their production capacity to smartphones in a bid to find alternative profit sources, Shanghai’s China Business News reports. In a saturated worldwide market, tablet sales growth started to moderate in 2014 from the skyrocketing growth seen in the past, the report said. In addition to a price war, a relatively long life expectancy of tablets has also slowed down market demand.

Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei Technologies said on Tuesday it will launch its public cloud computing services for Chinese corporate customers in July, becoming the latest Chinese company to enter the fast-growing market. Speaking at Huawei’s Global Analyst Summit in Shenzhen on Tuesday, Huawei rotating chief executive Eric Xu did not name the Chinese telecom carrier with which it would partner to offer the service. But Xu said the strategy would not create competitive friction with Chinese carriers, which have already indicated they plan to offer public cloud services.

TAIPEI — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC, 台積電) is expected to win the majority of orders from Apple Inc. for next-generation A9 chips that will be used in new iPhones, as its production processes are faster than rival Samsung Electronics Co., according to an Asia-based brokerage firm. “Market disputes over how many A9 (chip) orders TSMC would gain from Apple against Samsung are coming to an end, in our opinion,” the brokerage firm said, adding that TSMC’s manufacturing processes were superior.

Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has tied up with Sinopec, Asia’s biggest oil refiner, to provide cloud computing services and ‘big data’ analysis, the companies said. The link-up was for technical services and did not involve equity cooperation, China Petroleum & Chemical Corp, or Sinopec, said on its official microblog. It did not say how much money was involved. Cooperation between Alibaba, a poster child for private enterprise in China, and one of the country’s biggest state-owned companies dovetails with government policy.

Microsoft and 21Vianet, a provider of carrier neutral data center services in China, have extended their cloud partnership. 21Vianet will continue to offer Microsoft’s cloud in China, including Azure and Office 365 in China for an additional 4 years under the new agreement. 21Vianet acts as an operation entity for Azure, hosting Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure services and Office 365 in its data centers and handling customer relationships. A renewal agreement extends this setup to 2018 and suggests the partnership is bearing fruit for both companies.

MUMBAI: The share of rural internet users will increase nearly fivefold to touch 28 crore by 2018, signalling higher online purchasers going forward from rural India, says a research report. By 2018, the country will have “as many as 55 crore internet users, of which 28 crore would be from smaller towns and cities, expanding at close to 40% a year from six crore in 2014,” forecasts a report on digital consumption by Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

Which Singapore agency launched the best ICT project in the past year? Was it a smart housing scheme; a new e-government app; a transportation solution; migration of transactional services to the cloud; or something completely different? Will your agency be recognised during Singapore’s 50th anniversary year as a pioneer in using technology to transform service delivery? This can only happen if your agency enters the FutureGov Singapore Awards 2015.

KATHMANDU, APR 03 – Microsoft has launched Office 365 cloud service for businesses, educational institutions and consumers in Nepal. The service enables seamless sharing of data across personal computers and smartphones using cloud computing technology. Since it is internet-based, data and solutions can be accessed from anywhere using a browser, the company said.